Just Call Me "The Ned Flanders of..."
(oh, never mind)

Andrew Sullivan reviews Irshad Manji's The Trouble With Islam in this week's NYTBR with, one suspects, exactly the sort of mix between serious issues and light tone the Times overlords would like to spread throughout the system, like the description of the self-styled "Muslim refusenik" as "the Lisa Simpson of Islam."

I actually attended the first stop on her U.S. book tour at Coliseum about two weeks ago, and came away mostly impressed; the television presenter aspects of her speaking style, like the cheerful tone that never wavers whether agreeing or disagreeing, became a minor annoyance after a while, but it's hard not to be convinced by her enthusiasm about spiritual matters or her call for fellow Muslims to take a more active, thinking role in shaping their religion and its professed values.

I made a whole slew of notes during her talk and the subsequent Q&A, but unfortunately I managed to lose my moleskine notebook somewhere in IKEA yesterday afternoon (I suspect I may have put it down on a shelf in home organization when I was picking a medium-sized storage box up and forgotten to retrieve it afterwards). (And stop laughing about me going to IKEA, dammit.) So I can't really address all the points that I had originally planned to address, but overall, what came through was what Sullivan dubs "a liberalism that seeks not to abolish faith but to establish a new relationship with it." Manji believes that earlier periods in Islam's history could have (and did) accomodate that liberalism, and that the religion could easily do so again. I can't speak to the historical component of the argument, not knowing enough about it, but as somebody who strives to find a similar relationship between liberalism and my own faith, I support her efforts.

One thing I do especially remember from the event: her sharp condemnation of France's efforts to pass a law banning citizens from wearing religious symbols in the state-run schools, widely seen as an effort to suppress Muslim women from wearing headscarves. I concur: the proposed legislation is secularism at its most thickheaded and intolerant.